Opinions

The paper which addressed to the 37th World Congress of Poets in Mongolia, 17 August, 2017 at State Palace of Mongolia.
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POETRY and THE WISDOM OF NATURE
by G.Mend-Ooyo

...The voice of poets, who are the messengers of language and culture, needs to be communicated, for it expresses the heart and mind which beat through the veins of the natural world, pulsating at a single frequency, and it expresses the intuition which is the wisdom of the earth.
The early understanding of Mongolians was that human beings were created from Heaven and Earth, with Heaven as their father and Earth as their mother. In this way, the air and the wind, the clouds and the rain, the hills and mountains, the waters and the springs, the rocks and the stones, and the grasses and the vegetation - all has wisdom through being part of a living system. Pleasure and suffering and happiness and anger and frustration - the mind expresses it all.
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The Mongol people have, from the earliest times, used language to develop a communicative and respectful relationship, both with their livestock and with the wild animals, and have written, as a people, a huge number of propitiative invitations and prayers to the natural world, seen in the form of intelligent spirits and genii loci, manifest in the surrounding hills and rivers and trees and springs and stones. Human conversation reaches the spirits of these hills and rivers and trees and springs and stones, and since we believe that not only are such words preserved in the mind but that actions result from them, the figurative expression of this interaction through the rhythm and sound of poetry is regarded as an important and precious aspect of Mongol nomadic culture.

WORDS manifest the waves of power which have been absorbed within a person they are the horses of sound which continue to bear this power even to the edges of time. Because he have form and color, because they have their own momentum, because the havemanifest light and shade, words are material. A growing tree has its brabches, the branches have their leaves, the leaves have their veins, and similarly in the mind and the qualities of a person are eternally stored in their words.

It is said that in time immemorial, when the ice-covered Earth began to melt, first of all a mountain appeared. Later this mountain came to be known as Otgontenger, or “the youngest son of heaven. Now the mountain is one of the most important sacred sites in Mongolia. The vast territory known as the Central Asian plateau, bringing together khangai (forested area), steppe and the great Gobi, is the homeland of the great dinosaurs and early horses that lived many millions years ago. Traces of the first humans were found here. All these testify that poetry did not appear late in the Mongolian motherland. Mongolia is a country with distinctive seasons and a harsh climate --reaching an unbearable hot +40 degrees C in summer yet experiencing frigid snowstorms of -40 degrees C in winter-- and nomadic culture and civilisation. Now towns and permanent settlements have appeared and the nomadic and settled cultures and civilisations exist side by side. A process of differentiation and synthesis of both traditional and modern, globalised culture is taking place.

When I tell you all about the abovementioned, not only I mean to tell you about the fact that our harmonious existence and mutual respect with the natural world, our apprehension of it and discussion with it, have been preserved and remained in the nomadic civilization on the wild Mongol steppe to this day, but I also would like to raise questions on how can we protect and preserve the valuable aspects of this civilization and make them our guidelines for the future.

May we write with good and prayerful words, and with spiritual language, may we place ourselves within society, within the palaces of culture, and within gardens, and thus speak together of positive things. From our grandfathers, we begin by listening to prayers and benedictions, and we generally employ words which have the traditional human qualities and so, when we come to adulthood, may we create positive power in this way. Our grandfathers used to say prayers such as "Be at peace, and happy eternally," and "Be happy and live a long life," and our grandmother's prayers were the finest words absorbed into the milky tea they made, and this was the positive power which the children offered to nature and the world and the universe, beginning at the level of the state symbol.

Whilst working on the large Migjed Chenrezi project, I announced in 1991 the Script Culture program, a large and beautiful presentation in Mongolia’s proncipal exhibition hall. Working together with the famous scholar Dr D Tserensodnom, we began to prepare for publication a wonderful book by Shagj, previously unpublished, entitled Annotated Dictionary of Mongolian. It was this dictionary which had been the reason for Shagj’s arrest and execution. In passing sentence, the Interior Ministry at the time declared that, “In writing his Annotated Dictionary of Mongolian, Shagj has annotated many of the ancient, feudal words and has sought to minimise the new and progressive terms,” and then they had him shot. Shagj’s dictionary was published in 1993, and in Beijing, since at that time Mongolia did not possess suitable type for the traditional script. Tserensodnom and I completed Shagj’s work with the addition of some three hundred entries. Later, we also published his Dictionary of Mongolian Usage, originally produced in 1929, and for the 110th anniversary of his birth in 1996 we published these two dictionaries together with Mongolian Script the Easy Way.

History resurrects when it is imminently brought back to mind. The moment you go back to that far away pasttime in history or call it to the modernity, the time becomes relatively meaningless; everything comes to belong to the inner universe and prophecy.
Uyghur. Although this word sounds familiar and close to our hearts, we do not speculate and investigate further. But this time the incentive to remember the times of Uyghurs came to me, meeting so may Uyghur writers at the “International Conference of Ural Altaic speakers”, organized by the PEN Uyghur Center.

The morin huur is the musical history book of Mongol culture. In its strings, the joys and sadness, pleasure and pain, music and the mental motility of the nomadic community have come down to us over time. That is to say, the instrument is filled with history, colleceted in song. A recent performer, my father Dugars¨rengiin Gombojav (1912-1983) , composed many such song texts about horses and camels.
I should say a few words about how the place of the morin huur from the viewpoint of material culture. The modern tyform of the instrument has developed over history, and Mongol nomads have now reached a point where they are now integrated with things of value to them such as historical culture, aesthetic enjoyment and philosophical understanding..